Hindu

NEW DELHI, India -- In a somber address to the nation yesterday, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee made his strongest condemnation of the recent attacks on Christian places of worship in India and the killings of an Australian missionary and his two young sons as "a blot on our collective consciousness.""Such violence violates our tradition and culture of tolerance," he said on the 51st anniversary of the assassination of India's pacifist leader, Mohandas K. Gandhi. "It goes against everything that Gandhiji and our savants have taught us."

It's a tossup which is more intractable, the ethnic warfare in the former Yugoslavia or the religious-nationalist dispute over Kashmir. Both are deeply rooted in centuries of communal enmity that have no peaceful solution in sight.One important difference is that the Serbs and their targets don't have nuclear technology, while India and Pakistan have the capacity to engulf the world in thermonuclear war. Another difference is that the international community has identified the villain in Yugoslavia, while India and Pakistan have so muddied the history of their 50-year-old argument that it's impossible to tell the good guys from the bad.There probably never were any good guys, except for those Kashmiris who simply wanted to be left alone to make a living in the beautiful, mile-high valley in the Himalaya Mountains.

INDIAN PRIME MINISTER Atal Bihari Vajpayee and his Bharatiya Janata Party stand for Hindu identity and traditional, even reactionary, values. But the practical effect of their rule, is to modernize India, which may be the last thing they want culturally.By sweeping away the socialism and bureaucratism of a half-century of mostly Congress Party rule, Mr. Vajpayee and the BJP ushered in the free market and Asia's latest economic miracle.The next Vajpayee government will still be subject to regional party defection at any time on any issue, but looms stronger and stabler than Indian government has been lately.

NEW DELHI, India -- Indian national elections begin today, and, as always, they are likely to be a great, if unwieldy, display of democracy, this time requiring a month of voting and 800,000 polling locations for the 605 million people eligible to cast a ballot.But as impressive as Indian elections may be, they are becoming too much of a good thing, with this being the third vote in 40 months, a result of fragmented and sometimes treacherous politics that produce easy-to-disassemble coalition governments.

NEW DELHI, India -- Summoning all his moral authority, Pope John Paul II tried yesterday to persuade leaders of other religions here that interfaith understanding should lead them to recognize the Roman Catholic Church's right to evangelize."

NEW DELHI, India -- The Hindu nationalist-led government that turned India into a declared nuclear power collapsed yesterday. It lost a vote of confidence, 270-269, the narrowest parliamentary defeat for a government in independent India's 51-year history.The opposition Congress Party, led by Sonia Gandhi, the Italian-born widow of an assassinated prime minister, will try to cobble together a new government.Within hours of the vote, President K. R. Narayanan accepted the resignation of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party, but asked him to stay on as a caretaker while efforts to form a new government go forward.

Starr wants powers he should have, for an investigation not worth making. How do justices decide that?If Our Daily Bread was going to move, it should not have taken money from the Weinberg Foundation to build where it is.The Islamic Bomb has joined Hindu and Jewish ones. Together they don't stack up against the Christian Bombs.The surgeon general has found that cigars aren't chic.Pub Date: 6/01/98

COIMBATORE, India -- India's general election came to a tense end yesterday as voters in this southern textile city joined 150 million others in choosing between Sonia Gandhi's vision of a secular India and a rival vision of a country dominated politically by the culture and preferences of its 700 million Hindus.When results begin flowing in Tuesday, India will know whether a seven-week election campaign produced a return to government by the Congress Party, whose frayed banner Gandhi carried, or a historic turn to the Hindu nationalists of the Bharatiya Janata Party.

THE CONGRESS Party created modern India. Founded 113 years ago, it opposed British imperialism and crusaded for India's independence as a democratic, secular state. The party survived the loss of Muslim Pakistan and made India an inclusive mosaic of peoples, languages and religions. For all but five of the 51 years of independence, Congress has ruled.There is no more eloquent statement of the party's sad decline than its clamor to be led by an Italian Catholic woman who speaks Hindi and English with a thick accent.

NEW DELHI -- India's richest man, a former Madison Avenue ad man and the Hollywood company that put life in the "Jurassic Park" dinosaurs are bringing a Disney feel to a Hare Krishna temple here.Chants, saffron pajamas and wooden prayer beads are no longer enough to lure people to this strict Hindu faith, the temple's planners say. A multimedia message might."People believe in technology so much. They believe everything they see on the television, hear on the radio or see robots do," says Madana-Mohana Das, a Russian chemical engineer and religious student at the New Delhi temple.

India: People/Place/Culture/History DK, $40 India is a vast land, boasting famously high mountains (the Himalayas), fertile valleys (Assam is the heart of the country's tea industry), arid deserts and densely packed cities (Mumbai is among the most populated). This gorgeously photographed coffee-table book captures the immense country in all of its complicated glory. The long history section tells the story of the first prehistoric settlements, follows the emergence of regional kingdoms and the rise of the so-called Golden Age, the coming of Islam and India under British rule before discussing the state of contemporary India.

If, as the evidence indicates, last week's terrible events in Mumbai were the work of Islamic terrorists, that's more bad news for India's minority Muslim population. Never mind that the perpetrators were probably funded from outside India, in connection with the conflict over Kashmir. The attacks will feed a powerful stereotype of the violent and untrustworthy Muslim, bent on religious conquest, who can never be a good democratic citizen. Such stereotypes already shadow the lives of Indian Muslims, who make up 13.5 percent of the population.

The home of the Happy Meal never fails to give Vijai Nathan a feeling of security. It even helped lead her on a lifelong quest for identity and spiritual truths. In her one-woman autobiographical show, McGoddess: Big Macs, Karma & the American Dream, which opens Saturday at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, the comedian reveals how McDonald's, a Hindu mother, a born-again Christian sister, a semi-atheist father and her experience as a second-generation Indian-American made her question faith and influenced her self-perception.

Chanting "Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna," hundreds of believers of the Hindu sect dragged a crimson 30-foot-high chariot cloaked in sunflowers, carnations and roses. Wrapped in colorful clothing, they marched down Light Street yesterday afternoon and ended in the Inner Harbor, stalling traffic and drawing curious stares. This was the local version of Rathayatra, an Indian religious chariot parade. Figures of the three Hindu deities -- Krishna, Balarama and Subhadra -- are taken from a temple and placed on the elaborately decorated chariot.

"Sh'ma Yisrael Adonai Elohaynu Adonai Echad." "Hear, oh Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One." That one sentence is the essential, elemental creed of Judaism. But what God is that? A Christian God? A Jewish God? A Muslim God? A Hindu God? (Although it may be more correct to say, Hindu gods, because Hindus have hundreds of thousands, maybe even several million gods.) I'm certainly not talking about a Buddhist God, as God has no place in Buddhism. Everyone, in every faith, approaches God in his own time and his own fashion.

The women are dressed in kaleidoscopic colors, dancing in a whirling pinwheel and tapping wooden sticks with their neighbors' to keep the beat. Their white-robed priest leads the congregation in chants, offering fruit and fragrant flower garlands to the gods who stand watch on marble pedestals. As the night wears on, children rub their eyes and grandmothers yawn, waiting for midnight. That's when they can finally celebrate the birth of the baby Krishna, the most venerated Hindu god, the protector of the universe.

The women are dressed in kaleidoscopic colors, dancing in a whirling pinwheel and tapping wooden sticks with their neighbors' to keep the beat. Their white-robed priest leads the congregation in chants, offering fruit and fragrant flower garlands to the gods who stand watch on marble pedestals. As the night wears on, children rub their eyes and grandmothers yawn, waiting for midnight. That's when they can finally celebrate the birth of the baby Krishna, the most venerated Hindu god, the protector of the universe.

It was supposed to be a moment of Nirvana, but all I could do was laugh. The woman before me was chanting "Om" and then a jumble of words in Sanskrit (horribly mispronounced, I might add). The smell of sandalwood-infused incense filled the room. And pictures of the Hindu gods and goddesses, such as Ganesh and Lakshmi, adorned the room. What, was I in temple again? Only the Hindu priest, or swami, was a skinny blond in Spandex instead of the balding, pot-bellied man with the bare chest and wraparound skirt that always looked like it was about to slip off. The finale was when she clasped her hands in a prayer position and bowed to the floor.

VARANASI, India --Their hushed voices were drowned out by the howls of demonstrators. Just a stone's throw away lay the gory wreckage of Tuesday's temple blast. But inside a small square chamber on the compound of the Sankat Mochan temple yesterday afternoon, four men sat facing their monkey god and carrying out a job they had been paid to do: chanting the name of a Hindu god as a prayer for a stranger who was sick. "Om Sri Ram, jai Ram, jai jai Ram," the men muttered through the din and sensation.

NEW DELHI -- Bomb blasts in a crowded Hindu temple and a railway station left at least 12 people dead and dozens seriously wounded yesterday in the holy city of Varanasi, government officials said. One explosion rocked the Hindu Sankatmochan temple complex, one of the ancient city's oldest Hindu places of worship, as hundreds of people were gathered inside. The second bomb detonated minutes later at 6:35 p.m. in a railway station's second-class waiting room, police said. An express train bound for India's capital, New Delhi, was waiting at a nearby platform for a scheduled departure in 10 minutes.